Former U.S. congresswoman and current Florida gubernatorial candidate Gwen Graham said this week that what sets her apart from her declared competitors in the August primary is that she is “the only Democrat that can win.”
“This is a state with 67 counties, and there are wonderful people from one end to the other,” Graham, 55, said during an interview Wednesday at the Key Largo Holiday Inn. “You have to be able to do well in all counties across the state of Florida and build a coalition.”
In a recent poll of likely Florida voters released by Gravis Marketing, Graham is at the bottom of what’s looking like a tight three-person race at 9 percent, with former Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine leading at 13 percent, followed by Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum at 11 percent.
While part of her platform is passing “common-sense gun safety laws,” she’s taken heat this week from her opponents for her voting record on gun laws while she served in Congress from 2015 to 2017. Gillum’s communications director Geoff Burgan issued a critical statement Tuesday following the release of Graham’s firearms plan that in part called for the repeal of a 2011 Florida law that bans cities and counties from imposing their own gun control laws.
“Glad the congresswoman’s election year conversion includes backing @AndrewGillum’s successful fight against the gun lobby,” Burgan wrote on Twitter. “It would have been nice for her to support his fight when she was in Congress.”
Burgan was referring to a 2013 statement by Graham that she was a “very big supporter of the Second Amendment.” Democratic governor candidate Chris King attacked Graham earlier this month for not co-sponsoring a bill when she was in Congress that would ban military-style assault weapons following a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California in 2015.
Graham countered these attacks with a statement that the National Rifle Association spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying unsuccessfully to derail her bid for Congress.
“The NRA spent $300K to try to defeat me a few years ago — they lost,” she stated. “They’ve also spent untold millions buying off Tallahassee politicians and trying to destroy local control — when I’m governor, they will lose again.”
On Wednesday, Graham offered partial praise for the Florida Legislature, which passed its first gun control measure in 20 years in the wake of the Feb. 14 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglass High School in Parkland. The bill raises the minimum age of all gun purchases from 18 to 21, creates a waiting period for people buying guns and bans devices that can be attached to the stock of semi-automatic rifles that in effect turn them into fully-automatic machine guns. These so-called bump stocks were used by the Las Vegas shooter when he murdered 58 people in October.
But Graham said the law doesn’t go far enough.
